AI for Gen Z: A Story of Technology and Society

Table of Contents

AI for Gen Z: A Story of Technology and Society

Forward

Coherence

Singularity

Understanding Gen Z

Rage Against the Matrix

Calling In Sick

AI Disruptions

With Great Bias Comes Great Responsibility

All Is Noisy On The Digital Fronts

Davids and Goliaths

The Wolves of Silicon Valley

The Case Against the | Internet Generation

Techfluence

Deus Ex Machina

Inheritance

The Wallflower Generation

Bibliography

AI For Gen Z

The information referenced from these sources in this book was true and correct at the time of publication. The author is not responsible for alterations, changes, or removal of said sources.

Ayush Prakash is an Australian-born Indian-Canadian author and podcaster residing in Montreal, Quebec.

With a keen interest in the impact of technology on his generation, Prakash delves into subjects such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, genetic modification, and extended reality. His passion for these topics fuels his desire to demystify complex concepts for Gen Z audiences.

Center for Innovating the Future.

© 2024. All Rights Reserved.

This book and all its contents are the property of the Center for Innovating the Future. Any sharing, duplication, reselling, translation, interpretation, or use of this book, in any way, without written permission or agreement from the Center for Innovating the Future, is strictly prohibited and may result in civil or criminal penalties.

Center for Innovating the Future, Inc. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada innovatingfuture.com

Library and Archives Canada

Prakash, Ayush

AI For Gen Z

Center for Innovating the Future

ISBN: 978-0-9811821-2-4

Forward

BY BRYANT CRUSE

Why is there a Generation Z? That is, why does it have a name, or more broadly, why do we give each succeeding generation its own identification these days? It is generally agreed that the practice didn’t take hold until the 20th Century. At first, such designations were bestowed retroactively. For example, The Lost Generation was so named by author Gertrude Stein, for the people who came of age during the First World War.

It has always been recognized that the attitudes and perspectives of an entire generation can be molded by extraordinary events. But what has changed is that it is now expected that each succeeding generation will behave in ways distinguishable from the previous one.

Such generational change has not been the norm for our species. Philosopher and mathematician Jacob Bronowski, in his 1973 documentary series and book, The Ascent of Man, describes the Bakhtiari, a nomadic tribe in the Caucasus mountains that followed a way of living that remained unchanged for 10,000 years. Bakhtiari children performed the same tasks, dressed the same, ate the same foods, even walked with the same movements as their parents, generation after generation.

Human intelligence makes us uniquely adaptable to our environment. The Bakhtiari adapted and found ways to survive while following their herds over six mountain ranges and back again, every year. But intelligence also conveys an even more powerful survival skill: the capacity to alter the environment itself, to forcibly adapt it to us. This is also the capacity to create technology. The Bakhtiari could not create durable technologies because they were on the move everyday of their existence and could only utilize the tools that they could carry with them. And so, they became stuck in time.

But elsewhere, humans learned to domesticate animals and practice agriculture. Now they could settle in one place. With the invention of written language, they could pass accumulated knowledge and technology down the generations. With that technology they built cities, aqueducts, and ocean-going ships. They explored and altered the world they lived in and adapted to their new environment and changed themselves; not their core nature, but their beliefs about what the world is and how humans fit into it.

So began an ever-accelerating feedback loop. We change our world, then adapt to what we have created. Then we find a new perspective and from that perspective we change the world again. And with each cycle we grow farther and farther from the world we came from, the natural environment in which our core nature evolved. Today, the cycle of technology-driven change-adaption-change has become so rapid that it is recognizable in a single generation.

We might expect it would take someone from outside Gen Z with a perspective of many years to fully appreciate how technology has formed the values and attitudes of the newest generation. With this second edition of AI for Gen Z, Ayush Prakash has been able to understand the pulse of his own generation. With abundant statistics and references, he reveals preferences and practices of his generation that many in the more senior generations will find shocking.

Gen Z is, of course, the first to grow up with the Internet, a technology that continues to have a profound impact on our society. But even as we adapt and adjust to that disruption, another technology with an even greater potential to change the world we live in is looming, Artificial Intelligence.

Real intelligence in machines, combining humans’ greatest skill, the capacity to comprehend and alter the world around us, with the speed, reliability and connectivity of computers, would be the ultimate technology with the ultimate potential for societal disruption. In fact, as we are already seeing, the very idea of AI is disruptive.

Whether you are skeptical that today’s machine learning and so called GenAI applications are truly machine intelligence, an advance towards it, or merely a clever imitation of human intelligence, there can be no doubt, as Prakash explains, that they are already having a profound effect, not just on his generation, but on everyone of any generation. Everyone should read this book.

Coherence

HOW AI FOR GEN Z WROTE ITSELF

So that’s it. Pretty sick, right? I remember this moment like it was yesterday. Retrospectively a divine intervention, it felt like cosmic horror at the time. It was one of the many independent events that wove the narrative of this book. Acknowledging people is cool (and important) but rarely do we reflect on how many small, seemingly inconsequential events orient our lives a mere few degrees. Like a compass pointing us in the correct direction, if not for these reorientations, our goal, our destination, would not have been reached.

This introductory moment was when a friend of mine told me about his post-secondary plan. He talked about his dad, an accountant, and who had devised an ingenious solution that took care of 90% of his tasks at work. His father was, in my friend’s words, Just chilling everyday, yo. And that’s what imma do. Get an accounting degree and all that, and then just relax with my Machine Learning algorithm, or whatever. This last phrase made my